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Crowd sourcing

This article is part of our series: a day in the software life, in which we ask researchers from all disciplines to discuss the tools that make their research possible.

Archaeologists have long had a taste for computer-based methods, not least because of their need to organise large datasets of sites and finds, search for statistical patterns and map out the results geographically. Digital technologies have been important in fieldwork for at least two decades and increasingly important for sharing…

By Phil Fowler, Postdoctoral Researcher at Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford.

What is crowd-sourcing? Well, it is not a great name, at least for the type of crowd-sourcing I'm going to talk about - is sounds like something a film producer would do. The type of crowd-sourcing I'm interested in harnesses thousands of individual computers to run a series of complicated calculations or simulations. So what types of problems is it used for and where did it come from?

Crowd-sourcing has its origins in screensavers, such as SETI@home, which…